Sunday, February 25, 2018

President Maduro has
told the Bolivarian Armed Forces, he will create a special plan against what he
called the “the sabotage of the national electric system.”

“From today on I will
be working on this plan,” said
Maduro. Latter in the same speech he clarified that he himself would not be
designing the plan, instead he asked the Armed Forces to present him with “a
special plan against the sabotage and the war against the electric system,
because right-wingers want to boycott the elections [presidential elections,
April 22], and they have a plan to attack the whole [electric] service.”

Electricity blackouts
have left many areas of the country in the dark for hours in several occasions
in in recent years. The
most recent, on February 22, left 11 states without power for more than 11
hours.

Saturday, February 24, 2018

State security services
SEBIN have detained Luis Alberto Navas Medina and Eligio Arriaz, accused of
planning the assassination of the ex-president of Venezuela’s Central Bank,
Nelson Merentes. SEBIN’s director, Gustavo
González López, claims both detainees are militants of the opposition party
Voluntad Popular (VP).

González López
declared that these two “terrorists” are “allies” of VP leader Freddy Guevara,
who has taken refuge in Chile’s embassy in Caracas since November 2017. VP is
the party of the opposition leader Leopoldo López, currently in house arrest.

At one point in his
declarations González López claimed that the two “terrorists” wanted to kidnap
Nelson Merentes and ransom him for money to finance VP, later he says that
their real objective was to kill Merentes as part of “selective assassinations”
plan which would include other government officials. González López showed a
video, also posted on his Twitter account (@GJGonzalezLopez), of the interrogation
of one of the detainees, Luis Alberto Navas, in which he says that Freddy
Guevara was the mastermind behind the plan.

On Thursday, president Maduro
declared that security services had discovered the plan. “We have
recordings, videos, testimonies, and confessions from [militants] of the
terrorist party VP, they were preparing the kidnaping and the attack,” said the
president.

The Agencia
Venezolana de Noticias claims that the supposed plan to kidnap, or
assassinate, Merentes is part of “selective killings” of chavista leaders by an opposition that “has constantly used terror
as a political strategy, as they did in April 2002, when 19 Venezuelans were
killed and dozens wounded, with the aim of generating a constitutional breach
and justifying a coup d’état.”

Images showing alleged
links between Nava and several VP leaders were also posted by González López: